Guide To Social Security ARCHIVES

Register of the
ELIZABETH WICKENDEN PAPERS, 1923-1991

Professional papers, mainly 1932 to 1989, of a social welfare and Social Security policy consultant, analyst, and writer, and professor of public policy and urban studies. Documented are her positions in the Transient Bureau of the Works Progress Administration, Federal Security Agency, and Federal Emergency
Relief Administration from 1933 to 1941; her membership on the Kennedy Task Force on Health and Social Security Legislation (1960-1961) and the Advisory Council on Public Welfare (1964-1967); her work for the American Public Welfare Association in 1941; her activities as a consultant to national social welfare organizations such as the National Social Welfare Assembly, YWCA, National Urban League, Child Welfare League of America, Children's Defense Fund, and Project on Social Welfare Law, and her leading role in the Study Group on Social Security and the Save Our Security Coalition. Also reflected are her activities as Professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York (1966-1974) and at Fordham University (1979-1983). The issues she was concerned with include transiency, poverty, welfare reform, welfare rights, welfare law, child protection and child welfare, Social Security and Medicare legislation, national health insurance,and unemployment compensation. Materials include bulletins, clippings, correspondence, course materials, diaries, memoranda, notes, photographs, reports, speeches and writings. Prominent correspondents include Arthur Altmeyer, Robert Ball, Winifred Bell, Wilbur Cohen, Nelson Cruikshank, Norman Dorsen, Loula Dunn, Sidney Hollander, Marian Wright Edelman, Justine Wise Polier, Charles Reich, and Ellen Winston.

Literary rights are retained by Elizabeth Wickenden during her lifetime.

Presented by Elizabeth Wickenden, Haverford, Pennsylvania, 1970-1993. M70-266; M72-243; M73-226, -482; M77-500; M81-582; M84-222; M87-109; M88-132; M89-393; M90-100; M92-108; M93-180.

Processed by Cindy Knight, 1993.

Biography
Elizabeth Wickenden, daughter of William E. and Marian (Lamb) Wickenden, was born in 1909, in Madison, Wisconsin. She grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and Boston, Massachusetts, where William Wickenden was an assistant professor at MIT. The family moved to Ohio in 1929 when he became president of the Case Institute of Technology. In 1927 Elizabeth Wickenden enrolled in Vassar College where she majored in economics and sociology.

Wickenden graduated from Vassar in 1931. She travelled and studied abroad for a year before moving to New York City where she worked for the Emergency Exchange Association. In 1933, she moved again to Washington, D.C. There she held administrative posts in a succession of New Deal agencies, beginning with the Transient Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). When FERA was phased out in 1935 she transferred to the Works Progress Administration where she served as the assistant to Deputy Assistant Aubrey Williams until 1938. She worked next for the National Youth Administration (1939-1940) and the Federal Security Agency's Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services.

In 1933, Wickenden married Arthur Goldschmidt, a permanent delegate to the United Nations' Economic and Social Council, whom she met in New York. They had three children, Ann, Jean, and Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr.

In 1941, Wickenden left the federal government to work on behalf of the American Public Welfare Association, a national organization of state public assistance and welfare administrators. For the next ten years she served as the association's Washington representative, monitoring and interpreting federal welfare legislation and legislative developments for administrators and policy makers in the social welfare field.

After 1951, Wickenden eschewed permanent employment in social welfare organizations, preferring to work instead on a contractual basis as an independent consultant to organizations, foundations, government bodies, and political candidates. She was a member of the federal Advisory Council on Public Welfare during the 1960s and President Kennedy's Task Force on Health and Social Security Legislation (1960-1961). As a consultant on public social policy, Wickenden analyzed and interpreted policy and legislation, studied problems, helped formulate goals and strategies, and promoted social action. She was in great demand as a speaker and wrote numerous articles which were reprinted many times and widely distributed. Among the issues on which Wickenden consulted were Social Security and Medicare, child welfare, residence laws, the civil rights of welfare recipients (particularly women), and welfare reform. Chief among the national groups she worked with were the National Assembly of Social Workers, American Public Welfare Association, National Urban League, Family Service Association, the YMCA, the Children's Defense Fund, Child Welfare League of America, and the Field Foundation. In the course of her work, Wickenden wrote and distributed bulletins, memos, or fact sheets on particular policy issues, testified before Congress on legislation, lead workshops and conferences, and served on committees, boards, and advisory groups. She also distributed information about groups, issues, and her own professional activities in the form of daily or weekly "notes on recent activities."

One of Wickenden's primary commitments was to the Forum on Social Issues and Policies of the National Social Welfare Assembly (later the National Assembly for Social Policy and Development), to which she acted as a "technical consultant on public social policy." The forum brought together leaders of national, state, and local organizations to discuss current legislative and policy issues. Wickenden analyzed bills and proposals on public welfare and Social Security and if consensus emerged, Wickenden prepared and circulated a formal position statement on behalf of the participants.

In the early 1960s Wickenden became particularly interested in welfare law, a new field which sought to use legal measures to protect and promote the rights of individuals and families receiving welfare benefits. In 1962 she published an influential pamphlet, Poverty and the Law which cited the ways welfare agencies violated the statutory and constitutional rights of clients. She was instrumental in organizing the Project on Social Welfare Law at the New York University Law School, which stimulated research and publication on social welfare law and which served as a national clearinghouse for information on litigation, court decisions, agency rulings, and current research. In 1965 she was appointed to the Office of Economic Opporunity's Legal Services Advisory 'Committee which established the Legal Services Program. In 1972, Wickenden prepared an amicus curiae brief on Dublino vs. New York State Department of Social Services, a class-action suit which challenged state welfare regulations. Also during the 1970s, Wickenden served as welfare consultant and a member of the board of directors of the Children's Defense Fund; an advocacy group focused on the rights and condition of children. One of the Fund's activities was to litigate on behalf of juvenile clients of welfare agencies, juvenile offenders, and victims of racial discrimination.

After 1978, Social Security issues became more of a focal point for Wickenden's activities. She became the director of the Study Group on Social Security, which analyzed and reported on legislative and other policy developments. She also helped form the Save Our Security Coalition to lobby against program reductions.

In addition to her work as a social policy consultant, Wickenden taught graduate seminars at two New York universities. From 1965 to 1974, Wickenden was a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and also taught urban planning and welfare planning at the Hunter College School of Social Work. From 1979 to 1983 she taught a seminar on social policy analysis and development at Fordham University's Graduate School of Social Service. Wickenden also took an active role in social welfare issues affecting New York City, where she had resided since 1951. She was a consultant to the New York State Temporary Commission on Youth and Delinquency during the 1950s and director of the Project on Public Services for Families and Children at the New York School of Social Work from 1960 to 1961. In 1962 and 1963 Wickenden led an institute on social action methods, also at the New York School of Social Work.

In 1989, Wickenden formally retired and moved with her husband to Haverford, Pennsylvania. However, she remained actively engaged in issues of child welfare, Social Security, and national health insurance.

Scope and Contents
The papers document Wickenden's professional activities from 1934 to 1989 and consist of the following series: BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, CORRESPONDENCE, DIARIES, NEW DEAL AGENCIES, SUBJECT FILES, TEACHING FILES, and WRITINGS AND SPEECHES. With the exception of some scattered correspondence and some biographical material, there is very little personal information in the collection.

BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS consist of resumes, autobiographical articles, newspaper clippings, and transcripts of three oral history interviews. The first set of interviews, conducted by Jean Handler in 1986 and 1987 is perhaps the single richest source of information about Wickenden's early life and professional career in the collection. Wickenden describes childhood and other influences on her choice of career, the nature of her work for the federal government during the New Deal, and her role in the American Public Welfare Association during the 1940s, and most of her subsequent activities. The second interview, conducted in 1976 by the Bancroft Library, was part of the Helen Gahagan Douglas Oral History Project. It discusses Wickenden's and Douglas's friendship and professional relationship during Douglas's years in Congress, 1944 to 1950. The third interview was conducted by Peter A. Corning of Columbia University in 1966, and discusses Wickenden's involvement in Social Security, with an emphasis on the history of Medicare. The newspaper clippings included in the BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS concern Wickenden's professional activities through the late 1970s, her husband Arthur E. Goldschmidt, their children, and other family members. The earliest item is a 1923 clipping about a prize-winning play written by Wickenden at age fourteen. The bulk of the articles date from the 1960s. Five photographs include a portrait circa 1960 of Wickenden, photographs of her daughters at their weddings, and Arthur Goldschmidt attending a UN function in 1970. The photographs are available in the name file in the Visual and Sound Archives.

CORRESPONDENCE from 1951 to 1991 consists of both incoming and copies of outgoing letters and is arranged chronologically. These files are important in documenting Wickenden's professional activities but are not always complete: additional correspondence related to a particular issue, subject, or organization can often be found in the SUBJECT FILES.

Chronologically-arranged DIARIES consist of detailed daily or weekly typescript accounts of Wickenden's professional activities from 1963 to 1984. Included are summaries of phone calls, meetings and conversations, notes on trips, and events. This is a unique and especially rich source of information which she frequently copied and distributed to colleagues as a way of keeping them informed of her activities and of policy developments. These were alternately entitled "Wicky's Diary", "Notes on Recent Activities", or "Summary of Recent Activities".

Memoranda, speeches and reports documenting Wickenden's activities and responsibilities as a federal employee from 1934 to 1941 are found in the series NEW DEAL AGENCIES. Files are arranged alphabetically by agency and thereunder by subject or material type. The files appear incomplete, and very little correspondence is included. However, they do reflect her duties as a speech writer for high-level administrators of the Federal Security Agency and WPA, and the focus of her responsibilities on transient relief. Additional details about her activities are available in the transcribed oral interviews conducted by Jean Bandler.

SUBJECT FILES document Wickenden's work for specific organizations and on particular policy issues, legislation, and legal cases as a freelance consultant. Subjects are further grouped into the following three categories: Foreign consulting and travel; Legal files; and Social welfare policy, reflecting the main thrusts of her consulting activities.

Foreign files consist mainly of notes and reports on social welfare conditions in other countries. In Puerto Rico and Iran she acted as a consultant to those governments. A few years later she travelled to Southeast Asia as a consultant on social policy and development for the Welfare Administration of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The files also reflect her work on a United Nations' survey of world health and social welfare conditions.

Wickenden's Legal files contain correspondence, memoranda, notes, reports, rress releases, and drafts of articles on welfare-related legal cases. Reflected here is her interest in and promotion of judicial means to reform the welfare system. Of particular note are files on Dublino vs. New York State, for which Wickenden wrote an amicus curiae brief; and the Project on Social Welfare Law, to which she was a consultant.

Social welfare policy files document Wickenden's consulting activities on such issues as Social Security, welfare reform, public assistance programs (usually referred to as public welfare or AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children), child welfare, and unemployment compensation from 1940 to 1987. These files variously contain correspondence, memoranda, notes, reports, drafts, statements, press releases and small amounts of printed material. Correspondence and memoranda filed here may duplicate what is found in the CORRESPONDENCE series. There is also some overlap in terms of subject matter, between what is included here and the Legal files described above. The tape listed with the 1966 files is a recording of the Michael Schwerner Memorial Fund's award ceremony honoring Elizabeth Wickenden for her contributions to civil rights and social work. Speakers include Bayard Rustin, Norman Dorsen, Barbara Cross, Mitchell Ginsberg, and Rita McGuire.

The Social Welfare Policy files are further divided into two groups. The first half are arranged chronologically by year and thereunder by subject. These usually pertain to consulting positions of relatively short duration. The specific issues and organizations listed here also tend to vary a great deal from year to year. There are no chronological files for 1975, and after that year the files are fewer and fewer in number. The second half of the Social Welfare Policy files, representing organizations to which Wickenden made more sustained committments over time, are arranged alphabetically by organizational name and thereunder by subject. Included in this category are files pertaining to the American Public Welfare Association, Child Welfare League, Children's Defense Fund, National Assembly of Social Workers, Save Our Security, and the Study Group on Social Security. Material documenting Wickenden's work as the Washington representative of the American Public Welfare Association from 1941 to 1950 is largely missing, however.

TEACHING FILES reflect Wickenden's professorships at the City University of New York from 1966 to 1973 and Fordham University from 1979 to 1983. Materials found here include course notes and outlines, reading lists, student assignments and grades, and correspondence and memoranda regarding assignments, departmental affairs, and contemporary social welfare policy issues.

WRITINGS AND SPEECHES consists of chronologically-arranged drafts, notes, outlines, and final copies of articles, papers, reviews, conference presentations, policy statements, briefs, and speeches and related correspondence. The files are arranged chronologically. Wickenden's more significant presentations and publications are documented more thoroughly in the SUBJECT FILES series, where they are listed alphabetically by title.

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